In questa pagina: A.Gaudí, poltrona della Casa Calvet, legno di rovere,1900. On this page: A.Gaudí, Chair of the House of Calvet, oak wood, 1900.
Antoni Gaudí: the Craftsman The lesson of a great architect in the sphere of Catalan Modernism, between the factual wisdom of manual dexterity and new construction systems, on show in Rome in the Chiostro del Bramante (Cloister of Bramante). Gaudí worked during the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th in Barcelona, a lively city that was expanding economically and in its constructions. He worked within the framework of the Modernist Movement, which was connected to Art Nouveau, active also in the rest of Europe, where it took on different names (Liberty, Jugendstil, Secessione). The common trait was a basic conception of architecture as the unifier of all the arts. The primary reference to nature was accompanied by an internationalist spirit as the reflection of the cosmopolitan culture of the age. It was, therefore, a matter of proposing specificity, an authenticity, that while valorizing the heritage of factual wisdom of the manual skills possessed by the local artisans, was able to add enrichment to the international operating horizon. According to Gaudí, tradition had to be understood not only as a system of operating procedures, as a typology consecrated by time, but also as a recognition of the spiritual fabric, of the effects of the lived and of the interiorisation of the particular genius loci. Gaudí’s commitment was that of an expressivity that implies the knowledge and the mastery of diverse factors: first of all of the materials whose outcome,
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